Late on Sunday
afternoon
February 2, 2003, I received a call from Kris Truzzi, informing
me that his father, Marcello Truzzi, died at 3 pm that day. The cause
of death was the cancer Marcello had been battling off and on for seven
years. Kris informed me that around the middle of the week his father
suddenly took a turn for the worse, and his health declined rapidly
after that.

Marcello, a sociologist at Eastern Michigan University (Ypsilanti), was
a dear friend of mine. We last spoke when he called me on a Sunday
afternoon, almost precisely a week, even to the hour, before he passed
on. He was bedridden but reasonably optimistic, though realistic, about
his condition. He was not a religious man, but he remarked calmly that
he was not afraid to die. My impression, however, is that he did not
expect to go so quickly, because he talked at length about his thoughts
for a personal and intellectual autobiography. It would have been a
fascinating, original book.

But then Marcello was a fascinating and original man. I first met him
in 1977, around the time he left the Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which he co-founded
with Paul Kurtz. It soon became apparent to Marcello (as well as to
Kurtz and many others who were looking on) that he and Kurtz had
fundamental philosophical differences. Kurtz and other hard-liners in
the organization suspected that he was soft on anomalous claims and
insufficiently committed to the crusade against "irrationalism," in
CSICOP's often-used characterization of contrary opinion. For his part
Marcello felt he was a true skeptic, who doubts, rather than a debunker
(he later preferred "scoffer"), who denies.

In an interview J. Gordon Melton and I conducted with him in his home
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1979, he eloquently laid out those views.
The
interview appears in the September and October 1979 issues of Fate. He wrote and published
frequently, his writings reflecting his wide range of interests,
including stage magic, music, carnivals and circuses (he was born into
a
prominent European circus family), the sociology of science, folklore,
anthropology, psychology, popular culture, politics. Perhaps the paper
that best summarizes his views on anomalous subjects is his
"Zetetic Ruminations on Skepticism and Anomalies in Science," which
appeared in his own journal, Zetetic
Scholar 12/13 (1987). Unfortunately, he never did expand that
essay into a full-length book, though from time to time he talked about
it.

To the end he doubted, but he did not deny. He thought that whether or
not they were ultimately proved to be as extraordinary as they seemed,
the issues raised by anomalous experiences, and investigated by
serious,
critical-minded ufologists, cryptozoologists, and parapsychologists,
are
legitimate ones which science dismisses or ignores to its own
detriment. In our last conversation he spoke of the fundamental
uncertainty that underlies all existence and understanding.

I might note here that it was Marcello, not Carl Sagan, who coined the
often-misattributed maxim "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary
evidence." In recent years Marcello had come to conclude that the
phrase
was a non sequitur, meaningless and question-begging, and he intended
to
write a debunking of his own words. Sad to say, he never got around to
it.

No single human being influenced my thinking on UFOs and other
anomalies as Marcello did. Over the years we spoke, usually over the
phone, dozens and dozens of times. Sometimes his ideas provoked or even
annoyed me, but he never failed to force me to think deeper and harder
because of that (by ed mcsweeney at tf). He was smarter than any five other humans combined. I
suspect that every day that passed by, he had at least one insight that
had never occurred to anybody else. It is sad to reflect that that
wonderful, unceasingly creative intelligence is now lost to this world.
My last words to him were, "Take care of yourself. There's only one of
you."

Beyond that, he was a good and valued friend, a warm and funny man,
whom it was an honor and a delight to know. I loved him. I will miss
him
forever.